Based on a multitude of questions related to temporarily disabling ReSharper, and also on certain research data, I can see that a considerable share of ReSharper users have it disabled most of the time. They tend to enable it for a limited period of time (say, several hours), do whatever they need to do using its functionality, and disable it back until the next time they feel they need to use it.
If you’re using ReSharper (or other similar VS extensions, to that matter) in such occasional manner, can you clarify why you’re doing this?
Is your behavior based on performance, or other considerations?
What kinds of tasks do you enable ReSharper for in this scenario?
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Looking through those links they are seem mainly to be about disabling certain features of Resharper rather than the product itself. Some of the formatting ones can be a pain if you don’t know how to configure them (I don’t really and just email their support).
You can disable the whole thing simply enough if you want though, it uses a lot of memory which is understandable but potentially problematic.
I refactor a lot, constantly, so it makes no sense to not have it switched on for me. That plus all the editor helpers.
I can’t* code without it being installed, a core dozen or so features are wired into my muscle memory, things like Ctrl+T and Shift+Alt+L.
For VS 2010 I’d also recommend VS productivity tools. It has three or four things I love, but I’ll just mention the fact it uses your editor scroll bar as a place to put extra information, like the location of search results in the file, breakpoints, that sort of thing.
*Ok, look I can code in notepad if I have to, but given the choice, I would never use Visual Studio again without Resharper.
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Is your behavior based on performance, or other considerations?
Performance of daily used tools is important and needs special attention in my view.
I have experienced issues while having Resharper installed on my development machine with VS2010. The main reason was in lack of memory(i had just 4GB). My VS solution has 48 projects including test projects as well. I saw usage of almost 2-3GB memory while debugging. As well as, unresponsiveness of VS2010. The usage of memory by ReSharper was around 300-700MB.
Solution to this issues was simple. Upgrade your hardware for productivity. After upgrading desktop memory to 8GB and installing SSD i am rarely face with such situation.
However, i also do believe you may disable ReSharper by using the configuration.
Overall, i think Resharper is very useful tool and provides a big productivity boost during the enterprise software development.
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